The Complete Guide to dark field microscopy blood analysis

dark field microscopy blood analysis TECHNOLOGY:

Darkfield microscopy creates contrast in transparent unstained specimens such as living cells. It depends on controlling specimen illumination so that central light which normally passes through and around the specimen is blocked. Rather than light illuminating the sample with a full cone of light (as in brightfield microscopy) the condenser forms a hollow cone with light travelling around the cone rather than through it.

This form of illumination allows only oblique rays of light to strike the specimen on the microscope stage and the image is formed by rays of light scattered by the sample and captured in the objective lens. When there is no sample on the microscope stage the view is completely dark.

Care should be taken in preparing specimens as features above and below the plane of focus can also scatter light and compromise image quality (for example, dust, fingerprints). In general, thin specimens are better because the possibility of diffraction artifacts is reduced.

dark field microscopy blood analysis The Major Manufacturers

The major microscope manufacturers all have devices capable of dark field illumination. Depending on the make/model, the microscope may come with attachments or have the options for dark field accessories. The major companies are:

The leading innovators in microscopes are Nikon and Olympus, who both offer stereo and compound microscopes with dark field capability and/or accessories.

dark field microscopy blood analysis lyme disease

Although this video clearly shows a spirochaetal shaped bacteria, it cannot identify what spirochaete it may be. To show that those bacteria are in fact Borrelia (the spirochaetal bacteria shown to cause Lyme borreliosis), proper DNA sequencing would have to occur. From our perspective, if the person is sick and these are showing up in their blood, then treat the patient for a spirochaetosis while waiting for confirmation. Treatment is chosen within the patient/doctor discussion as to type of antibiotic and duration. Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA) guidelines are not recommended. Current Canadian medical policy is to simply defer to the IDSA guidelines on matters of testing and treatment therefore we cannot recommend following Canadian medical policy in any province until patient expert’s opinion is given full and equal voice in the writing of Canadian medical policy relative to Lyme borreliosis.]

Slide 5

These video clips are from an experiment in which 11 friends provided a tiny amount of fingertip blood on a microscope slide.

All donors were met through patient support groups and have chronic illness.

8 of 11 have been ill for 20 years or longer.

9 have been diagnosed with M.E. or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

10 of 11 had negative NHS tests for Lyme borreliosis – one was not tested.

9 had private tests that were positive.

These eleven donors represent a total of 235 years of illness and 170
years of lost productivity.

How to made the dark field microscopy blood analysis?

How to made the dark field microscopy blood analysis ?

It is very easy to make dark field microscopy blood analysis yourself. What you have to do is place an opaque round stop in the condenser. An easy way is to cut a piece of black paper and put it on a filter in your filterholder. You can put the stop on a piece of clear acetate sheet. You can even try to draw the stop on it with black paint. The most important thing is to have it big enough to stop all light going directly into the objective. Only the light that is reflected by the objects in the sample reaches the objective then. Stronger objectives are more difficult because their NA is often too high. The NA of your condenser should always be higher then the NA of the objective. If patch-stops of 8, 10, 12 and 15mm are made you can’t go wrong really. For objectives of around x10 the middle sizes prove best.If you like to make the patchstop as precise as possible: The best way is to set up as normal (brightfield), remove the eyepiece and close/open the substage iris until it is *just* visible. Then, either bending your neck over double, or carefully removing the condenser, measure the diameter of the iris diaphragm as it is now set. A pair of calipers is useful here. This diameter is that for the patch stop. Very often, to be on the safe side it is best to add about 10% to this figure, this avoids leakage, especially if you have no means of centering the stop in the filter holder. If you have a phase contrast condenser, the largest phase contrast annuli often make excellent patch stops for darkfield!The real connoisseurs must have recognized the skills of Klaus Kemp in the arranged (cleaned) diatom slide photographed by Mike Samworth.

dark field microscopy blood analysis

dark field microscopy blood analysis (dark-ground microscopy) describes microscopy methods, in both light and electron microscopy, which exclude the unscattered beam from the image. As a result, the field around the specimen (i.e., where there is no specimen to scatter the beam) is generally dark.

Light microscopy applications

In optical microscopy, dark-field describes an illumination technique used to enhance the contrast in unstained samples. It works by illuminating the sample with light that will not be collected by the objective lens and thus will not form part of the image. This produces the classic appearance of a dark, almost black, background with bright objects on it.

The light’s path

The steps are illustrated in the figure where an inverted microscope is used.
Diagram illustrating the light path through a dark-field microscope

Light enters the microscope for illumination of the sample.
A specially sized disc, the patch stop (see figure), blocks some light from the light source, leaving an outer ring of illumination. A wide phase annulus can also be reasonably substituted at low magnification.
The condenser lens focuses the light towards the sample.
The light enters the sample. Most is directly transmitted, while some is scattered from the sample.
The scattered light enters the objective lens, while the directly transmitted light simply misses the lens and is not collected due to a direct-illumination block (see figure).
Only the scattered light goes on to produce the image, while the directly transmitted light is omitted.

Advantages and disadvantages

dark field microscopy blood analysis is a very simple yet effective technique and well suited for uses involving live and unstained biological samples, such as a smear from a tissue culture or individual, water-borne, single-celled organisms. Considering the simplicity of the setup, the quality of images obtained from this technique is impressive.

The main limitation of dark-field microscopy is the low light levels seen in the final image. This means that the sample must be very strongly illuminated, which can cause damage to the sample. dark field microscopy blood analysis techniques are almost entirely free of artifacts, due to the nature of the process. However, the interpretation of dark-field images must be done with great care, as common dark features of bright-field microscopy images may be invisible, and vice versa.

While the dark-field image may first appear to be a negative of the bright-field image, different effects are visible in each. In bright-field microscopy, features are visible where either a shadow is cast on the surface by the incident light or a part of the surface is less reflective, possibly by the presence of pits or scratches. Raised features that are too smooth to cast shadows will not appear in bright-field images, but the light that reflects off the sides of the feature will be visible in the dark-field images.

Use in computing

dark field microscopy blood analysis has recently been used in computer mouse pointing devices, in order to allow an optical mouse to work on transparent glass by imaging microscopic flaws and dust on its surface.

When coupled to hyperspectral imaging, dark-field microscopy becomes a powerful tool for the characterization of nanomaterials embedded in cells. In a recent publication, Patskovsky et al. used this technique to study the attachment of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) targeting CD44+ cancer cells.

Transmission electron microscope applications

Dark-field studies in transmission electron microscopy play a powerful role in the study of crystals and crystal defects, as well as in the imaging of individual atoms.

Conventional dark-field imaging

Briefly, imaging involves tilting the incident illumination until a diffracted, rather than the incident, beam passes through a small objective aperture in the objective lens back focal plane. Dark-field images, under these conditions, allow one to map the diffracted intensity coming from a single collection of diffracting planes as a function of projected position on the specimen and as a function of specimen tilt.In single-crystal specimens, single-reflection dark-field images of a specimen tilted just off the Bragg condition allow one to “light up” only those lattice defects, like dislocations or precipitates, that bend a single set of lattice planes in their neighborhood. Analysis of intensities in such images may then be used to estimate the amount of that bending. In polycrystalline specimens, on the other hand, dark-field images serve to light up only that subset of crystals that are Bragg-reflecting at a given orientation.

Weak-beam imaging

Weak-beam imaging involves optics similar to conventional dark-field, but use of a diffracted beam harmonic rather than the diffracted beam itself. Much higher resolution of strained regions around defects can be obtained in this way.

Low- and high-angle annular dark-field imaging

Annular dark-field imaging requires one to form images with electrons diffracted into an annular aperture centered on, but not including, the unscattered beam. For large scattering angles in a scanning transmission electron microscope, this is sometimes called Z-contrast imaging because of the enhanced scattering from high-atomic-number atoms.

Digital dark-field analysis

This a mathematical technique intermediate between direct and reciprocal (Fourier-transform) space for exploring images with well-defined periodicities, like electron microscope lattice-fringe images. As with analog dark-field imaging in a transmission electron microscope, it allows one to “light up” those objects in the field of view where periodicities of interest reside. Unlike analog dark-field imaging it may also allow one to map the Fourier-phase of periodicities, and hence phase gradients, which provide quantitative information on vector lattice strain.

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